I Take My Kale Straight

Today I'm writing about kale.

This incident happened, maybe thirty years ago, back when kale wasn't cool. Dorothy and I were just finishing up our steak dinner at a restaurant. The young waiter, who clearly didn't know his job, came by the table to see how we were doing. We were munching kale. Says he, "You don't eat that green stuff. It's just for decoration."

Things have changed. Now, to be cool you order kale coleslaw. To be uncool, you add bacon bits, which are fragments of animals raised and killed for the pleasure of humans. 

Which brings me back to Todd May and his book, "Should We Go Extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times." Todd does the philosopher thing, adding up pleasure and subtracting suffering resulting from a human life, as if you could quantify such things. He says that  the average person in the USA consumes 22 pigs, 1560 chickens and 65 cows in a lifetime. He also describes in detail the conditions on factory farms and in abattoires, putting me off my bacon. 

About the abattoires, using a mellifluent French word for slaughterhouse is one of the sneaky ways we isolate ourselves from what goes on there. Todd May describes the process in detail and we follow that piggy every terrifying step of way. If we think of bacon as something to improve the taste of kale, le cochon voit sa situation différemment.

Still don't know if we should go extinct, but from now on, I take my kale straight. 

Wealth and Cloying Comfort

Dorothy began to peel a banana for breakfast. Then she stopped. It was too ripe for her tummy, warning her off with a whiff of amyl acetate. I suggested we pretend to be multimillionaires and stick the banana to the wall with duct tape. She said no, so we continue as pensioners, like millionaires but with no banana on the wall. 

We wealthy lust for absurdity
to distract us for a moment
from cloying comfort. 

What can you get for six million dollars:
1000 residential heat pumps, 
200 solar roof arrays,
100 electric vehicles,
10 modest houses,
one homeless shelter,
a banana for lunch? 

Lunch for this pensioner includes
toast but no banana.
Dorothy saves the bread bag to reuse,
remembering the problem of plastic
and the value of truth and beauty.

I forgot that all of it,
banana and duct tape,
toast and plastic,
truth and beauty,
ALL OF IT,
is absurdly priceless.

Remembering,
I am distracted for a moment
from cloying comfort.

P.S. I had the banana for supper.
Nothing wasted in the writing of this note.

P.P.S. the editor (myself) read this through a dozen times before noticing I had written peal when I meant peel. I am distracted for a moment by the absurdity of a banana ringing like a bell. Priceless.

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COP 29 settles for 300 Billion per Year: Associated Press, November 23, 2024

Global Average Temperature Record: Berkeley Earth

What Do You Think?

In an earlier note I referred to a book by philosopher Todd May with the title "Should We Go Extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times". I'm reading it now, anticipating an answer but pretty sure there may be many reasonable answers. I mean, it depends. 

What we should do implies deciding what's good. That depends on who your friends are, because the duties to friends in different groups are not all the same. In our human centred culture, human life is valued above all else, the rest of the biosphere being something to control and exploit. 

But what's good for humanity here and now may result in a cascade of remote bad consequences coming at us. What's good for us humans isn't necessarily good for the biosphere. And what's bad for the biosphere may ultimately be bad for us humans. What's good may be bad? It's complicated.

I would like to have a simple answer for what's good and pass that along, because it would be good for my self esteem if you were to read my blog and think well of me sitting here at my computer in climate-controlled comfort while the planet burns. If I were the CEO of an oil corporation, the return on investment would be the ultimate good because, if I get it right, I would get a performance bonus, so extinction would be fine if it happens after I'm gone. If I were a whale in a warming ocean with no krill left to eat, human extinction would be quite nice; bring it on. If we nature lovers shut down the oilfields in deference to the whales, there would soon be a new government voted in by SUV owners demanding cheaper fuel. If I were a disembodied immortal intelligence looking in from outside, humanity would be just another evolutionary experiment that will extinguish itself by turning its prolific success into prodigious failure. Who cares?

I don't know if we should go extinct. Maybe it would be good if we were wise enough to survive being clever for awhile longer so we could figure it out. What do you think?

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Climate Extremes: At the Abyss?: documentary

Has The World Surrendered to Climate Change: CBC News, Nov 7, 2024

Trump Presidency Could Alter Global Climate Policy: Inayat Singh, CBC News, Nov 16, 2024

Trump's Energy Secretary: What's right for Wright and wrong for the planet.

Death of Clean Green Energy in the USA, Not a Chance. Here's Why: Just Have a Think, Nov 17, 2024

Optimistic Climate News: Just Have a Think, Nov 6, 2024

No Flies on Us

Warm spell yesterday. I was in the yard cleaning up dead sunflower stalks. The flies were out too, one last feast before the freeze. Lots of shooing and swatting.

Change of topic. Thinking about the American election the day after it all went down, I almost wrote the following:

The Orange Cheese is
gonna Make America Grate Again.

Sorry, puns are fun, but I shouldn't have let that one loose.

I was thinking as a neighbour of the USA who didn't get to vote but along with the rest of the world will have to put up with MAGA grating on us for the next few years. My gut response to precedent Trump is to reflect insults back at him. I call him precedent Trump because he has demonstrated what he is good for (trash talk, dominance posturing, lies, misogyny, xenophobia, threats, obscenities, aggressive nationalism) and surprisingly that is what the majority chose! 

I apologize. I won't write any more insults because I don't want to participate in puke politics. Even if Donald walks like a duck and talks like a duck, let's give him a chance. Winning the confidence of the majority might remind him that some people think of him as an actual human. If he behaves like one, we should forgive the occasional quack. I know. Faint hope.

Oh stop it, Dennis. You're still at it.

Well, that's what people do when they are frustrated, threatened, needy. Find someone to blame and let 'em have it. 

So who really gets the blame? "Every nation has the government it deserves." Half of Americans want to give the finger to the other half and also to the rest of the world. Donald is their finger, their weapon of choice grated from a blob of orange cheese by an angry mob who are their own worst enemy. "We have met the enemy and he is us." 

MAGAs be warned: precedent Trump has let it be known that the more you try to redirect his pointy finger, the more likely you are to be its target. Even Trump's friends are not safe (Pence, Milley, Cheney). You chose this, America. Good luck controlling the orange finger.

Get a grip, Dennis. You go too far.

I confess. All I have written so far came from the amygdala, which is where tantrums originate, raw fear and anger as a quick, uncensored response. As the brain matures, the output of the amygdala is processed by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. But if you live long enough, that stops working and you just write a blog like this one so you can get it off your chest.

Is my aggression showing? Can you feel your own ire rising in response to mine? You know, anger can get you into trouble. We know this because of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which evaluates sensory input in the light of experience and responds rationally. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) works hard and makes reasonable choices, but takes its time. Another few decades and I should nail it. I know. Faint hope.

 

Angry amygdalians really like Donald, he who skillfully expresses their contempt for reasonable PFCs. This difference in thinking styles has become the badge distinguishing friends from enemies. PFCs know that it's pointless to point back; but when pressed, they will go amygdalian in self defense, though they aren't as good at it as the pros.

It's catching, an amygdalitis pandemic. Economic and environmental stressors are spreading this dis-ease all over the globe. Common sense says fight to win. Uncommon sense says it isn't a game; if we fight, everybody loses; if we work together, we all win.

Horses solve such problems
with mutual back scratching. 

We should be so wise. 

If we were passionately rational
           and rationally passionate,
there would be no flies on us.

Business Bites

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The only constant is change itself. (Heraclitus)

You will recognize this opening as one of my favourite literary devices, paradox. Here are some other paradoxes. I didn't make these up. You can Google them to find their sources if you don't believe me.

1. Freedom isn't free. Neither is free energy.

2. Fixing stuff makes messes. Cleaning up messes makes more messes: the second law of thermodynamics.

3. Those who want to save their life will lose it.
Matthew 16:25

4. It's weird not to be weird. ( John Lennon )

Some paradoxes work by equivocation, using a word in different ways without saying so. Like freedom isn't free. Decoded: freedom in the sense of having options isn't free in the sense of being without cost. You are going to pay. There is an analogue to this paradox in the first law of thermodynamics which is about energy, called Gibbs free energy, free in the sense that it is available to do work. There is a cost to free energy. We're going to pay.

Other paradoxes make use of a limitation of thought: when we attend to the particular, we miss the whole. If you make your choo-choo go by burning coal, you can ignore the second law of thermodynamics for a time while making use of the first law; but eventually you or your grandchildren will wind up in a mess. If you try to save things by hunkering down and burning more fossil carbon, you are done; the mess will get you.

Whatever the reason for confusion, a paradox is an unsettling puzzle demanding that we make sense of it. Make sense of this. Business as usual includes plans for change. In the absence of plans for change, business fails. Antagonistic to this idea is the instinct to withdraw from the threat of failure and return to the safety of some imagined golden age when things were going well because the mess could be ignored. We didn't imagine that dealing with the mess would require us to change or fail. We are going to change or fail.

If you know the second law of thermodynamics you are the only one in the room who knows and you are weird. Otherwise, you are not weird, which is weird because the only way out of this mess is to respect the second law of thermodynamics. We cannot continue indefinitely to make messes faster than the system can regenerate and export chaos in the form of heat. That is mathematics, not opinion.

Now that we have established that business bites, we are going to make some changes.

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401 words. How am I doing?

Cree Nations Working to Conserve Traditional Lands: The Narwhal

COP 28 UNCCC: Climate Change Conference: what was achieved.

COP 29 UNCCC: Climate Change Conference: November, 2024

COP 16 UNCBD: Defending Biodiversity at Risk and the Path to Regeneration: International Press Agency

COP 16 UNCCD: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

The AMOC Collapse: Just Have a Think, Oct 27, 2024

Should We Go Extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times. The Current, interview of Todd May by Matt Galloway